Meta Faces Social Media's "Big Tobacco" Moment as 29 States Take the Company to Trial in California

The Trial That Starts Tuesday Opening arguments begin Tuesday in the case co-led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, with a jury seated last week at Oakland's federal courthouse. Lawyers representing California, Colorado, New Jersey and Kentucky will argue the unified case, which the state coalition brought in 2023.

Opening arguments begin Tuesday in the case co-led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, with a jury seated last week at Oakland's federal courthouse. Lawyers representing California, Colorado, New Jersey and Kentucky will argue the unified case, which the state coalition brought in 2023.

The allegations: Meta fostered addictive behavior in teens and children, violating the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and various state consumer protection statutes.

Bonta's framing leaves no room for ambiguity. "Meta designed a dangerous product for young users, knew it to be dangerous, and then lied to children, families, and the community about how dangerous it was," he said. "We are ready to hold Meta accountable for its role in fueling the mental health crisis of American children and look forward to trial."

Meta calls the coalition's "limited claims" unsubstantiated and its "financial demands vastly disproportionate." The company argues the AGs "offer no proof anyone in their states was misled, claim benign features like having an additional Instagram account somehow harmed their residents, and attempt to penalize Meta for industry-wide challenges like age verification."

Why "Big Tobacco" Keeps Coming Up

Industry experts are comparing this moment to the 1990s reckoning for tobacco companies, which were forced to pay billions for misleading the public about the harms of their products and saw their power dramatically diminished afterward.

The comparison is not just about money. It is about a coordinated, multistate legal assault on the design of the product itself.

New Mexico Wrote the Blueprint

Earlier this month, Meta lost in New Mexico. A jury there ruled in March that the company must pay $375 million for violating the state's unfair practices act, and the judge later ordered another $567 million into an abatement fund in a second phase involving child sexual exploitation allegations. Meta disagrees with the ruling and plans to appeal.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, fresh off that victory, sees his case as the template. The focus on app design features and alleged misrepresentations about safety, he said, "really provides a blueprint for other states to hold them accountable."

The design-focused approach matters legally: it lets states sidestep Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has generally shielded tech companies from liability over third-party content. A Los Angeles jury used similar reasoning in March, finding Meta and YouTube negligent for failing to warn users about the dangers of their platforms.

The Scale Problem for Meta

Torrez is blunt about what California means. "This is a state with some 2 million people," he said of New Mexico. "If you map that same argument onto California or Florida or Texas or New York, I mean, that's a potentially massive and a market shifting force."

"You could wake up with a headline judgment that is, as I've said, astronomical," he added.

Julia Powles, executive director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, agrees the venue is everything. "California matters more than any other jurisdiction in the U.S.," she said. "It's where they are subject to the greatest legal reach, and it's a jurisdiction watched around the world."

The Money Meets the AI Bet

The timing hits Meta where it hurts. The company gets 98% of its revenue from online advertising, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is relying on that ad cash to fund an artificial intelligence buildout that could cost as much as $145 billion this year.

A gargantuan judgment would land directly on the balance sheet financing that bet. Torrez argues Wall Street has not caught on: Meta's stock is down 11% this year, but analyst concern has centered on AI capital spending, not legal exposure. "The analysts aren't pricing this correctly right now," he said. "That California judgment by itself could be gargantuan enough that it changes the ability of this company to do what it needs to finance into the future."

Worse Than the Money: The Redesign

Beyond damages, the states want the courts to rewrite how Meta's products work.

For COPPA violations, the AGs are seeking permanent nationwide injunctive relief. If Meta is found to have violated the federal law, they want the company to delete all personal data collected from children under 13, along with the algorithms and models trained on that information.

For state consumer protection violations, they want Meta forced to remove what they call addictive design features: infinite scroll, autoplay, ephemeral content, beauty filters and engagement-optimized algorithms.

"They have the ability that private plaintiffs typically do not have to actually force these companies, through the court system, to change their business model, their design decisions, all of that," said Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center who worked on the Los Angeles case.

The Caveats

Not every demand survives contact with a courtroom. In New Mexico, Torrez did not get everything he sought. The judge declined to eliminate infinite scroll or alter recommendation algorithms, reasoning that some changes could conflict with Section 230 and First Amendment protections, and that imposing them would be unfair while rivals like TikTok and YouTube kept the same features. Torrez now plans to pursue those changes through legislation instead.

And even a massive payout may not reach the people harmed. "It's all going to go to government, and then they're going to dole it out, and then the plaintiffs' bar is going to take a cut out of it," said Michael Coffey, a defense litigator and founding partner of New York firm Coffey Modica, who called it the kind of case that can define a state AG's career.

What Comes Next

The trial unfolds before federal judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, with the verdict likely months away. Meanwhile, the legal pressure keeps stacking up: a big federal trial involving a collection of school districts is expected to begin in Northern California next year, after Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap settled the first round of consolidated school district cases this summer. Whatever happens in Oakland, the design of social media is now on trial, and the outcome will set the price of the business model itself.